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Opening reception: Thursday, September 29th, from 6 to 8 pm

I came in at a time when there weren’t any young photographers working in a free way. Everyone was tired, the war was over, Dior let the skirts down, and suddenly everything was fun. It was historically a marvelous moment for a fashion photographer to begin.
—Richard Avedon

During a career that spanned nearly sixty years, Richard Avedon re-defined fashion and portrait photography in an extraordinary body of work about beauty, power, age, and identity. Ranging across a full breadth of subject matter in reportage, portraiture, fashion, and advertising work, he dissolved the perceived barriers between photography’s many genres.

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Avedon’s early fashion photography, depicting women in elegant couture amidst the cafés, nightclubs, and street life of postwar Paris. Appearing in Harper's Bazaar at the height of its influence, his photographs were instrumental in changing the popular understanding of fashion. Indeed, their influence still resonates in the fashion magazines of today.

The photographs in this exhibition were selected by Avedon in 1978 for the portfolio Avedon/Paris, on the eve of a retrospective exhibition of his fashion work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They depict celebrated beauties in high fashion, including Marlene Dietrich in Dior, Dorian Leigh in Piguet, and Suzy Parker in Lanvin-Castillo. These photographs exemplify Avedon’s innovative style during his earliest creative peak: his models are full of expression, smiling, laughing, and posed in action in the City of Light.

Avedon began his professional career in 1942 as a photographer with the U.S. Merchant Marine. In 1945, he set up his own studio and worked as a freelance photographer for various magazines. Mentored by leading graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch and legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, he rapidly rose to the top of his profession to become the preeminent photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. He continued to shoot fashion photographs and portraits for magazines throughout his career. Parting ways with Harper's Bazaar in 1965, he began a working relationship with Vogue that continued through 1988. In later years, he established formidable creative partnerships with the French periodical Egoïste and The New Yorker, reinvigorating his style within their pages.

Avedon’s fashion images never conformed to the prevailing standard of models posed without emotion, aloof from the camera, and seemingly devoid of personality. Instead, he set models in action, provoking them to appear questioning, authoritative, unruly, beaming, and self-consciously alive. Keenly aware of the melancholy inherent in the fleeting nature of great beauty, his incisive photographs crystallized transient moments of grace. These are images that wed sublime fantasy with tenacious realism.

Richard Avedon (1923–2004) received a Master of Photography Award from the International Century of Photography. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Washington, D.C.; Amon Carter Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many other museums and institutions worldwide. Throughout his career, Avedon produced and published books including In the American West (1985), Observations (1959), Nothing Personal (1964), Portraits (1976), and a fashion survey Photographs 1947–1977 (1978). His first museum retrospective was held at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962. Museum exhibitions during his lifetime included Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1970); “In the American West”, Amon Carter Museum (1985); “Richard Avedon: Evidence 1944-1994,” Whitney Museum of American Art (1994); and “Portraits” the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2002). Since his death, Avedon’s work has been the subject of a number of survey exhibitions, most recently “Avedon Fashion 1944-2000” at the International Center of Photography (2009).

For all other information please contact the gallery at [email protected] or at +41.22.319.3619.